Costa Rica Countdown!! And Packing For A Purpose

Barbara: Well, this is it, folks! Our first adventure of 2012 and the year is only 3 days old. Tomorrow we leave for Costa Rica!!!!

We’ve been running around these last few weeks, goggle-eyed and holiday-zombied. Not only have there been holiday to-dos and house-fulls and parental duties (speaking for Deb), but children home who must now be packed back off to school (sniffle, sniffle).

I was so paranoid about my ability to pack coherently for our trip under these circumstances that I started a week ago. You know, throwing this and that into a suitcase as thoughts occurred. Making sure I’ll have all the wardrobe necessities covered. But not to worry—inspired by Deb’s order, I did take stock yesterday, eliminating any extraneous items (I mean, who needs 5 bathing suits for 7 days, especially when 2 of them are so old, they risk disintegrating like wet tissue?). There’s more yet to do today, but mostly I am set.

And speaking of packing, one of the travel docs we were sent by our gracious hosts included a link to a site that I had never heard of before. They do seem to be well established so I imagine many of you might already know them, but if you don’t, we thought it would be good to introduce them to you. The organization is called Pack For a Purpose and they help set you up if you want to bring truly necessary items to your destination country. You simply go to the site, enter the country you’re visiting, determine what the needs are, then click to the participating hotels. You bring as much as you want from the list and drop it off at the nearest hotel.

As luck would have it, The Harmony Hotel is one of the hosts of Pack For a Purpose and that’s the final hotel on our itinerary. Deb and I plan to bring school supplies and soccer balls.

We do wish we’d known about this program well before leaving because we might have been able to organize a donations collection. That said, now that we know this is an option, we’ll pay more attention the next time we travel. But we are just THRILLED we discovered them in time for our trip—we’ll keep you all posted on how it works once we get down there.

Fair warning for our Costa Rican travel diary: we will post daily, but we will probably only get to post at the end of each day (or during cocktail hour :) ). Tomorrow’s post will go up after we travel and settle in at the first hotel (so don’t look for one at our usual 8am).

We can’t wait to take you with us on our grand adventure! See you in the rain forest.

Costa Rica Gifts of Happiness from the Costa Rica Tourism Board!